American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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new approach’’ to relations between nations and people would become possible. As he wrote in 1965, ‘‘if a power like the United States voluntarily withdraws from the arms race and makes the changes in its own social structure which this entails, this would constitute ‘intervention’ of historic dimensions.’’71
Muste’s efforts to end the war in Vietnam combined his pragmatic and prophetic impulses. On the one hand, he worked relentlessly to overcome the divisions on the liberal left and within the peace and civil rights movements that inhibited taking a strong stance against President Lyndon B. Johnson and the war. In New York, the result was a new coalition, headed by Muste, known as the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, which managed to bring together groups as diverse as labor unions, women’s peace groups, black power revolutionaries, Protestant clergy, young Trotskyists, and liberal peace activists in opposition to the war. In the fall of 1966, the Parade Committee worked with other anti-war groups to form the November 8th Mobilization Committee, which, in early 1967 became known as the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), with Muste as national chairman.72
At the same time, Muste insisted upon his right and the moral imperative of resistance, regardless of its popular appeal. As he wrote to a fellow peace activist, ‘‘Are prophets not needed in this age? Should prophets keep silence if they are unpopular and unheeded?’’ The ‘‘real world’’ was neither the ‘‘world of ethics, love, nonviolence’’ nor ‘‘the world of power.’’ Rather, these two worlds were in ‘‘perpetual tension,’’ a tension that only became creative ‘‘when, in [Martin] Buber’s phrase, ‘the plowshare of the normative principle’ is driven into the hard soil of political [reality], not when the plow is withdrawn from or blunted by the hard soil.’’73 Muste thus encouraged and participated in myriad civil disobedience campaigns against the war. His final act of defiance, at age eighty-two, was to bypass the State Department and visit with Ho Chi Minh in order to ‘‘convey the spirit of peace to the stricken people of Vietnam.’’ He died in February 1967, soon after his return.74
Central to Muste’s enduring radical politics was his philosophy of history as a joint project of human beings and God. Drawing parallels to his biblical namesake, he held that history began when Abraham left the city of his ancestors. By going out to find ‘‘a city which existed—and yet had to be brought into existence,’’ Abraham demonstrated that divinity was to be found in the history of human work and creation. For Muste, then, ‘‘the crucial thing about men, or societies, is not where they came from but where they are going.’’ Indeed, it was precisely when ‘‘human communities’’ decided to ‘‘intervene in their own destiny’’ that history was made rather than lived.75
Since the 1960s, the liberal left has faltered and declined, losing faith in transcendent ideas of social progress and in the power of human beings to make change. Muste would have shared these critiques of the Enlightenment tradition and its notions of rationality, universality, and progress, but he also would have insisted on the human and divine imperative to continue dreaming and creating. ‘‘Without a vision, the people perish,’’ he wrote in 1955, paraphrasing Proverbs 29:18, at the height of the ColdWar.76 Regardless of whether one shares his pacifism or his religious faith, his thoughtful and determined efforts to reconcile idealism and realism, collectivism and liberalism, internationalism and Americanism, anti-imperialism and labor unionism may offer insights on how to reinvigorate the dynamic and contested liberal left that once so indelibly shaped American political culture.
CHAPTER 1
Calvinism, Class, and the Making of a Modern Radical
Character is built by action rather than by thought. Contemplation does not beget virtues. But out of the elements of the daily struggle we mold at last conceptions of justice, parity and truth and build that temple of morality which is the chosen seat of true religion. Finally, it is only through the conflict into which his unrest urges him that man at last finds God. Revelation is powerless if it enlightens only the reason. . . . And faith is valid only when it leads to action, so its ultimate satisfaction is found only in the active life.
—A. J. Muste, 1905
MUSTE WAS BORN in January 1885 in Zierikzee, a port town in the province of Zeeland in the Netherlands. Zierikzee, Muste learned later in life, was apparently the Dutch ‘‘equivalent of our Podunk,’’ small, poor, and remote.1 Indeed, from the nineteenth century to the present, Zierikzee and Zeeland as a whole have had a reputation for economic backwardness and religious orthodoxy. A series of islands located on the extreme southwestern coastal zone of the Netherlands, much of Zeeland actually lies below sea level and is protected by a system of river and sea dikes. This location gave rise to a paradoxical character. On the one hand, as its reputation as the boondocks of the Netherlands suggests, Zeeland was isolated from the mainland. On the other hand, because it was located in the estuaries of some of Europe’s greatest rivers, it was a commercially and strategically important area to control.2
This paradox of isolation and interconnectedness provides the backdrop for Muste’s experiences in the Netherlands, the reasons for his migration to the United States in 1891, and perhaps even a key to his adult character and politics. A close analysis of his childhood and youth reveals that the Dutch American community was less insulated and conservative than Muste characterized it or than historians of Dutch ethnicity have recognized. Despite their best efforts to isolate themselves, the small world of Dutch American Calvinists intersected with larger processes of global capitalism, industrialization and class formation, international migration patterns, urbanization, and cultural changes related to religion and gender. It is in these intersections that it becomes possible to understand the making of a modern radical.
THROUGHOUT the nineteenth century, Zeeland’s economy was like its geography, both remote from and integrated into the world market. As the least urbanized and industrialized province in a country that already lagged far behind its neighbors in its level of modernization, Zeeland had a profoundly rural character. At the same time, however, the development of its rich sea-clay soil was capital and labor intensive, which encouraged concentration and proletarianization. In spite of the expansion in commercial agriculture, Holland’s modern industrial sector did not grow fast enough to absorb the increasing rural population. The result was a rising number of day laborers and servants reliant upon a commercial economy vulnerable to world market fluctuations. True to its reputation, Zeeland led the country in child and infant mortality, death and birth rates, and emigration rates.3
The Mustes were a quintessential Zeeland family.4 The patriarch, Martin (also known as Marinus) Muste, was the second oldest child in a poor family of five or six children. When he obtained a job in Zierikzee as a coachman for the local nobility, the sense was that he had risen ‘‘a bit in the economic scale.’’5 The matriarch, Adriana Jonker, came from a large family of ten or eleven children in the countryside and was, Muste recalled, ‘‘very definitely a peasant woman.’’ Unlike Martin, who had completed the fourth grade and who could read and write, Adriana read with difficulty and she could not write. Her and Martin’s first child, a son, Abraham Johannes, had died in infancy, and they gave their second child the same name. Soon thereafter, Adriana gave birth to three more children, two daughters, Nelley and Cornelia, and a son, Cornelius.6
In spite of his family’s poverty, Muste never had a sense of weariness or desperation and recalled having a contented and happy childhood. His mother was ‘‘an extremely good housekeeper and a good cook,’’ who kept her family clothed and fed. One St. Nicholas Day—the Dutch equivalent of Christmas—stood out in Muste’s memory as being particularly joyful. He must have been about three years old, since only his sister Nelley was present, as they waited by the staircase for Santa Claus. Suddenly, there was a commotion and cinnamon-spiced nuts began rolling down the stairs. ‘‘Then Santa Claus himself came stomping down the stairs, distributing gifts. He left by the front door and in a moment or two mother came back laughing happily. It was a most stimulating and yet soothing sensation